After an almost year long hiatus I am getting back into math blogging. The new address is a bit long but at least easy to remember! (turns out “pdeblog.wordpress.com” was already taken!), please update your bookmarks!

The old site (the one you are looking at now) will be up at least for a while, but all the old posts have been copied to the new blog, To reflect the fact that nearly all posts here have dealt with Partial Differential Equations the new site will go by the name “PDE Blog”.

This is the second of a series of posts dealing with the regularity theory of elliptic equations. My motivation in writing these is outlined in the first post.

Some consequences of Harnack’s inequality the Mean value property

The mean value property is characteristic of harmonic functions, but the fact that harmonic functions control their pointwise values by their local average is a general fact that is characteristic of elliptic equations (as we will see later, less sharp but more general theorems for nonlinear elliptic equations still have this flavor and are at the very heart of the regularity theory of fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs). Let me mention a few of its consequences, I already talked last time about Harnack’s inequality, as it follows from the mean value theorem, the mean value theorem (at least for harmonic functions) is more fundamental.

My friend and former UT graduate student Adriana Salerno (currently at Bates) will be running the 2010 AMS Joint Math meetings blog. She was also in charge of the blog in previous years (you can check them out here and here). I recommend you check it out in the next few days to see what has been going on at the meetings (specially if, just like me, you don’t happen to be in San Francisco this week).

There is a tedious, simple but hopefully fruitful exercise I always wanted to do. It is to review all the different proofs of the Harnack inequality and regularity of solutions to elliptic equations that I know, but only for the Laplace equation. First, because it is a good way to really get your hands on some of the ideas of several deep theorems (like those of De Giorgi-Nash-Moser and Krylov-Safonov) in the simplest possible setting. Second, because looking at all the different proofs it is possible to trace the evolution of analysis and PDEs through the last century (and a bit before that) and appreciate the level maturity reached in several fields: potential theory, singular integrals, calculus of variations, fully non linear elliptic PDE and free boundary problems. The `simple’ and `elementary’ Laplace equation lies at the intersection of all these fields, so every new breakthrough reflected on our understanding of this equation, each new proof emphasizing a different approach or point of view. Each of the proofs that I will discuss are based on one of the following:

The Calderón-Zygmund theorem (ok not exactly a `Harnack inequality’, but it should be on this list anyway) which uses the machinery of singular integrals.

The De Giorgi-Nash-Moser theorem, which follows the variational point of view and it is best suited for quasilinear equations or equations in divergence form.

The Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimate and the Krylov-Safonov’s `Harnack’s inequality’, which follows the comparison principle point of view and it is best suited for fully non linear equations or equations in non-divergence form.

So I am going to review each theorem and its proof but only for Laplace’s equation: . To start off easy, I am going to do first the proof via the mean value property.

First proof: mean value property

The mean value property says basically this

Let be a function in the unit ball of . If and is a sphere contained in and centered at , then equals the average of on

It is not hard to prove with some calculus, one basically looks at the function `Average of on the sphere of radius centered at ‘= and shows that , and since by continuity , the theorem follows. To show one sees (by say, a change of variables) that and this last integral is zero thanks to Stokes’ theorem and the fact that . Moreove, integrating the result with respect to the radius of the sphere one gets the same statement where instead of average over a sphere we have an average over a ball.

With this, one may prove easily Harnack’s inequality for harmonic functions, which I will state formally for the first time

Theorem 1 For any nonnegative harmonic function in we have the inequality

Proof. Let , then the ball of radius centered at (call it ) is completely contained in , thus by the mean value property

but is also contained in and since is nonnegative we have , again by the mean value property. This finishes the proof.

That is for today, in the next post I will explain some of the consequences of this theorem and maybe move on to the proof with potential theory methods.

(Note: this post was made using Luca Trevisan’s Latex to WordPress program, which is very useful although I am still getting used to using it. It allows you to prepare your post in a latex editor and then translate it into HTML code which WordPress can read, I strongly recommend it)

After 4 months of inactivity, I am taking up again the task of updating the blog, which has suffered of neglect due to my terrible time management skills.

I am not going to take off from where I left last time (namely, the posts about the Minkowski problem, which I will finish, someday), but instead will start the year with some shorter, lighter posts. I plant to start with a few posts about varifolds vs currents vs BV sets, and also about the Harnack inequality, maybe later I will write a bit about topics from phase transitions such as the Stefan problem or the Cahn-Hilliard equation

I know things have been extremely slow lately, but I was moving last week (and well, that means packing everything, moving things to the new house, cleaning the old house, unpacking things at the new one… well, you get the picture).

My goal for this week is presenting Aleksandrov’s solution to the Minkowski problem (see an earlier post I did introducing this problem). So I am going to leave you a problem as a preview, it is a sort of discrete version of the Minkowski problem:

Let be a family of non-coplanar unit vectors in and let be positive numbers such that

Then, show that there exists a convex closed polyhedron with exactly faces with normal vectors given by and corresponding areas . Plus, this polyhedron is unique up to translation.

This is fact is not surprising (since it is not hard to check that any polyhedron has this property), but the proof is far from trivial. As you may guess, the proof cannot be constructive, it will use a continuity argument to show that there must be at least one such polyhedron. I will present this in my next post.